As well as naming and shaming offenders, they should also ask social media sites to take such posts down, according to legal authorities Recruiter has spoken with.

Creating original content online to engage candidates is now an essential part of a recruiter’s marketing mix. However, increasing instances where recruiters face rivals lifting posts they have created and reposting them without attributing them to its original author have been brought to Recruiter’s attention.

Commenting on the options at a recruiter’s disposal when situations like this occur, Peter Wright, managing director at DigitalLaw, told Recruiter that whether action can be taken rests on the content on the post and whether the poster has exercised creative control over that post.

“If it is possible to establish that, then you can argue their intellectual property (IP) vests with that; and from a legal perspective that has been established when it comes to tweets, for example. Therefore, there is that technical argument to say: ‘That is my IP and you are using it, you are indeed ripping it off’.

“That would involve some quite complex and potentially expensive legal remedies. The point is IP does vest with that and creative choices have been made with regards to putting that content online.”

Wright adds the complainant would also need to demonstrate financial loss to their business as a result of the poster reposting their post without attribution, so a better course of action may be just to name and shame the perpetrator online.

Stephen Jennings, partner and solicitor at Tozers Solicitors, agrees. He told Recruiter: “If wording has been copied, it is potentially a breach of copyright but unlikely to be worth pursuing unless loss can be showed to have flowed from it – the sort of situation where you normally just send a strongly worded warning letter threatening action if it happens again.”

But Alex Woolgar, senior associate at Kemp Little, told Recruiter even naming and shaming a perpetrator may not be a good idea: “I would probably be a bit cautious about that normally, just because you don’t want to create an enemy where it’s not necessary.

“If it’s a really persistent course of conduct, yes you probably have to consider a public-facing strategy to discredit the rival in some way. Although there might be a more elegant way of doing that…”

Woolgar adds if the complainant has the resources, a strongly worded letter from a lawyer will normally do the trick.

“If you’ve got some resources, the general thing you would do is to get your lawyer to write a snooty letter telling them ‘you might not be aware, but you can’t just copy posts – this is copyright infringement and if you don’t stop doing this, we will take legal action against you’. That usually does the trick, so you don’t need to spend more than that. If you don’t have the resources to do that, you probably just want to contact them directly and say: ‘Look, I’ve noticed this post, it’s clearly a carbon copy of my original thinking – I’m not very happy about this. Please confirm you won’t do it again and if you do I need to involve lawyers’.”

Although Woolgar adds recruiters could also ask sites such as LinkedIn to take the offending post down.

“You can submit what it is called a takedown request. If LinkedIn is satisfied there has been a copyright infringement, LinkedIn may well of their own volition take it down and the reason for that is potentially if LinkedIn doesn’t take action where there is clear copyright infringement, they can get mixed up in the infringement, so it’s in their interests to take that down.”

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